Advanced Format Drives supported under Fedora 11?

[agillis]

I am purchasing a Western Digital WD10EARS 1TB hard disk for use with Fedora 11. My questions is will I get good performance or do I need some tweaking?

This drive has the new Advanced Format with 4k physical sectors. Some people have had performance problems with these drives. I want to make sure Fedora 11 can format the drive corectlly.

[agillis]

I just bought a new Western Digital Advanced Format drive and Fedora doesn't seem to support the new 4K physical sectors.

Any new Western Digital Advanced Format drive with EARS in the name will have this problem.

Does anybody know of a patch to fix this? Without a fix you will take a 10X performance hit using these drives!

[agillis]

I have the drive now and sure enough I'm taking a 10x performance hit.

[marko]

You need the *very* latest code:
kernel 2.6.31 or later, util-linux-ng 2.17 and later for the fdisk in there
and a similarly new parted package

Here's are good discussions about this

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux....-linux-ng/2926
http://www.osnews.com/story/22872/Li...or_Hard_Drives

If you do get a new enough copy of parted, it has an option called --align that when passed "optimal" will
setup your disk for the 4KB

-a optimal OR --align optimal

optimal
Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information. This aligns to a multiple of
the physical block size in a way that guarantees optimal performance.

To keep it short, you might not have a way to do this in Fedora 11 because of the hooks you need updated in
the kernel. I have Fedora 13 rawhide and this stuff is in there.